This dissertation investigates the soft typology of phonological patterns. By studying the types of patterns observed in the world's languages, we can do more than determine what is attested and what is unattested, or what is possible and what is impossible, but discover a wide range of more gradient phenomena. Phonological patterns range from…

It is often assumed that all languages are fundamentally the same. This assumption has been challenged by research in linguistic typology and language evolution, but questions of language learning and use have largely been left aside. Here we review recent work on Danish that provides new insights into these questions. Unlike closely related…

This dissertation presents a series of case studies concerned with whether the signal in a given set of measurements that we take in the course of linguistic inquiry reflects grammatical competence or performance factors. We know that performance and competence do not always covary, yet it is not uncommon to assume that measurements that we take…

Understanding how native speakers acquire the phonological patterns in their language is a key task for the field of phonology. Numerous studies have suggested that phonological learning is a biased process: certain phonological patterns are easily accessed and learned by the speakers, while others show acquisition difficulties. These differences…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

Cognitive linguists argue that certain sets of knowledge of language are innate. However, critics have argued that the theoretical concept of "innateness" should be eliminated since it is ambiguous and insubstantial. In response, I aim to strengthen theories of language acquisition and identify ways to make them more substantial. I…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

This paper presents an investigation of verb morphology in the spontaneous productions of three preschool Egyptian Arabic- (EA) speaking children with language impairment (LI) and a group of typically developing children. The typological characteristics of Arabic, such as its rich morphology, lack of infinitival form and complex verb system, make…

This article suggests a method to deal with cross-linguistic differences in children with Specific Language Impairment. The differences in vulnerable structures reflect typological properties of the surrounding language (e.g., Leonard 2014a, 2014b). This article adds a developmental perspective to the discussion by interpreting the vulnerable…

There are three hallmarks of core linguistic properties. First, they are expected to be manifested in typologically different languages. Second, they should unify superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena. Third, they are expected to emerge early in the course of language development, all things being equal (Crain, 1991). The present study…

This article investigates spoken productions of complex questions with long-distance wh-movement in the L2 English of speakers whose first language is (Canadian) French or Bulgarian. Long-distance wh-movement is of interest as it can be argued that it poses difficulty in acquisition due to its syntactic complexity and related high processing load.…

This paper is concerned with a specific case of L3 acquisition: the starting position for English vowel acquisition by infant German-Italian bilinguals will be investigated in light of prototype theory. The chosen example of triple language contact is characterised by consecutive bilingualism as the basis of L3 acquisition, where the learners' L2…

In this article we examine language processing and development in Catalan or Spanish-speaking children with SLI, focusing on the study of the verb. We analyse the key initial phase of its process of acquisition and aim to define common features of the SLI group that distinguish them from children with normal language development. We intend to…

Reference set computation -- the construction of a (global) comparison set to determine whether a given derivation is appropriate in context -- comes with a processing cost. I argue that this cost is directly visible at the acquisition stage: In those linguistic areas in which it has been independently established that such computation is indeed…